The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Machine-Type Communication (MTC) is a promising and emerging technology. Potential MTC based applications include smart metering, healthcare monitoring, remote security surveillance, intelligent transportation systems, etc. These services and applications stimulate the design and development of a new type of MTC device that may need to be integrated into current and next generation mobile broadband networks such as LTE and LTE-Advanced.
An emerging category of MTC devices includes devices that may be designed to support a relatively lower cost structure than traditional MTC devices or devices designed for human-type communications (HTC). Such lower cost MTC devices may be commonly referred to as low-cost MTC (LC-MTC) devices. The existing mobile broadband networks, however, were primarily designed to increase performance for HTC, not MTC. This issue may be compounded when considering LC-MTC design. Currently all of these devices, including LC-MTC devices, coexist on the same broadband network which may limit the cost reductions an LC-MTC device may be able to realize.